An unofficial, eclectic, mostly tangential, view of aspiring devotee life.
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Sunday, September 18, 2005

I think Srila Prabhupada's example of the frog in the well is very much akin to the Flatlanders thinking. When trying to understand the ocean he is limited to his perceptions of space. Is it 5 times my well, is it 10 times etc. Eventually one gets into numbers that one just can't understand, like me trying to understand the national debt in dollars above say, I dunno, 100 billion or something. I just have no concept of a number like 5 trillion.Continued...I received this from a friend:

I was visiting the site you mentioned in your blog about the Flatland example. I remember reading it years ago (the book) and your example brought back an interest on my part. On the homepage I saw a picture I was interested in and redid it to my perception.

I think Srila Prabhupada's example of the frog in the well is very much akin to the Flatlanders thinking. When trying to understand the ocean he is limited to his perceptions of space. Is it 5 times my well, is it 10 times etc. Eventually one gets into numbers that one just can't understand, like me trying to understand the national debt in dollars above say, I dunno, 100 billion or something. I just have no concept of a number like 5 trillion.

The material world is a b---- but we do get to pop our heads through the covering now and then and see some mercy. Varsana gave a nice example at his Gaura Purnima lecture. He said if we give an ant a huge diamond, the ant just doesn't get it. It doesn't understand the value, but give him one small grain of sugar and he will be in bliss. Similarly, we don't understand the incredible mercy of Lord Caitanya. Its amazing scope and potency is beyond us, but give us a little sense gratification and we are happy campers.

If I'm that guy in the picture, I think I should crawl through the space and get over there fast instead of just peeping through now and then. Conditioning is a tough nut to break. Of course chanting Hare Krsna is the recommended solution for all in this age to be able to cross over and live in the sunshine of that mercy.

This is more accurate. The spiritual world (4th dimension) has something unseen in the material world (3D) represented here by color. I think even the color in the spiritual world should be somewhat muted slightly where Lord Caitanya's color is the most vibrant. I think that would convey the supreme excellence of Caitanya's mercy, which I feel is primary even to Krsna's pastimes in our KC movement. Of course it is all beyond category of good, better, best in this realm as the Lord has so many incarnations and all are no less than the Godhead. Even the maha mantra would work in place of Caitanya's picture in that regard.

Did you ever see the movie "Time Bandits" ? It was from a George Harrison production company and was about these small people who stole the map of the universe that God used to create it. It had flaws and they used it to find these flaws which were portals to another time in history. So they would use these "doors" they found on the map to get out of trouble in their immediate time frame. It had subplots of good and evil and mans purpose and all and was a comedy of sorts with Monty Python like humor. John Cleese has a small role as Robin Hood.

Anyway the doors or windows along the edge of the photo, where a man is viewing the spiritual world are known by the spiritual master. He can show us these openings and we can take advantage of them. He, so to say, has the map. Without his kindness and mercy we would never ever find them on our own using our given tools of philosophy, reason, logic etc.

A devotee should not see anything as being separate from the Supreme Personality of Godhead, Krsna. Ether, fire, air, water, earth, the sun and other luminaries, all living beings, the directions, trees and other plants, the rivers and oceans -- whatever a devotee experiences he should consider to be an expansion of Krsna.
Thus seeing everything that exists within creation as the body of the Supreme Lord, Hari, the devotee should offer his sincere respects to the entire expansion of the Lord's body.

Rabindranath Tagore:

A mind all logic
is like a knife all blade.
The hand that uses it will bleed.